Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on some of these trends that you are talking about. Tell us a bit about what is in the horizon versus what is already active. You talked about personalized learning. Are products already in the market that are personalized learning games?

David Lord: I would call the products that we have today similar to personalized. They don’t necessarily have the ability to adapt in mid-motion like technology allows us to today. It really comes from the learnings that we’ve made as we converted our games to the cloud. The technology jumps that have been taking place have enabled us to have different views of data. That’s really what’s driven the technology capabilities.

When you’re thinking about a game, we have 25 million game players each quarter. That’s a lot of kids to customize learning data for. What we’re trying to do is build an adaptive engine to almost all of our games. It’s one thing that Jumpstart adapts and understands that you’re a four-year-old, but School of Dragons also understands where you are in science in relation to all of the other games that you might be playing and to understand where you might fit in the classroom.

Those are the things that are really exciting. The connectivity between adaptive learning and kids in the family, whether at school or in home are new capabilities. When you combine that with the idea that those products might, in fact, be virtual reality as well, that’s pretty exciting stuff.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about the personalization algorithms that you’re using?

David Lord: We’re always pretty good at algorithms because it’s a game company. Half of your game is about physics. It’s AI. It’s a physics algorithm. As we tweaked our learning engine, it has really been about putting the relationships of the various games and the performance.

In School of Dragons, the child will learn the scientific method, first and foremost, when they start a game. Each time they go on a quest, you’ll have to come up with a hypothesis, experience the science, then do a test in the lab or in the real world. Then we’ll evaluate that. We not only have this question and answer format, but we also have weightage for what you thought before you did any research on it. It adds a whole element to the knowledge that we’ve built.

We’ve built a massive amount of analytic data, not at the child level, but at the age level that we can match against and give a parent good information as to where that child stands.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: David Lord, CEO of JumpStart
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